Surveillance Camera Players Out-door Walking Tours (SCOWTs)
Besides their on camera performances, the Surveillance Camera Players also embark on cartographic endeavors, first mapping out graphically the location of control devices in different neighborhoods to then educate people about their existence through guided tours. These SCOWTs—Surveillance Camera Players Out-door Walking Tours—start with an inaugural gesture in which the tour guide (generally SCP's leader, Bill Brown) points to one of the cameras in question. The tours also include a moment in which Brown reads the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution, positioning the written text so it can be spotted by a surveillance camera that would not catch the spoken text.
The Surveillance Camera Players' performances and cartographies participate in the impetus towards an engagement of performance as "research and expose" (SCP, We Know, 21). Both stagings and tours can be approached as embodied maps that survey (and intervene in) the state of pervasive surveillance.
Other groups, such as the New York Civil Liberties Union, the New York City Surveillance Camera Project, and the Institute for Applied Autonomy also monitor the proliferation of cameras, calling attention to their unregulated use by private and official agencies. The practice of active cartography is a shared tactic among these counter-surveillance militant groups.
In October of 2001, the Institute of Applied Autonomy (IIA) released its web-based program iSee. The program, that can be launched on the Internet as well as through hand-held devices, not only maps the location of cameras in Manhattan—providing a remarkable visual representation of a dense landscape made out of dots—but it also creates itineraries of less monitored routes for users who want to get from here to there without being scrutinized. People en route can simultaneously collaborate in the mapping campaign by alerting others about new cameras as they encounter them in their strolls.
Besides participating in the mapping and surveying endeavor, the work of the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) has been instrumental in protesting the proliferation of cameras in shared spaces as a violation of rights, especially in relation to racial profiling and the rights of free association. The organization stresses the fact that, besides the alleged resourcefulness of cameras as a crime prevention tool, the use of surveillance devices by the police in the context of lawful demonstrations suggests that people's rights to express dissent are being closely watched.
The NYCLU—a branch of the American Civil Liberties Union—stresses the fact that there is currently no regulation regarding procedures on the installation of the cameras and the proper management of the data generated by these devices. The organization is not alone in calling attention to the lack of policies that are fundamental in terms of establishing objectives on the use of vigilance technologies, or the lack of acknowledgement on how this practice affects racially marked communities, and how the pretended efficacy of the technology relies as much in its visibility as in its being unnoted by the untrained eye.
There is also a deep concern about the archives that are being produced by official agents and by private owners. Visual dossiers are being compiled and, as many activists point out, the use of Face Recognition software is not a practice that belongs in sci-fi movies like Steven Spielberg's Minority Report (2002) but that is currently at work. Racial profiling, a practice banned by law, makes a return in the NY post-9/11 era, and activists warn us about the possibility of an unregulated practice of matching data banks' profiles with actual, racially, and ethnically marked individuals.
The importance of establishing protocols to regulate the use of surveillance cameras, and the need to enforce and monitor these procedures, are concerns that have already proven fundamental. On their website, the Surveillance Camera Players list a series of surveillance camera abuses, many of which expose the problematic link between video and digital technologies, when the records produced by surveillance cameras end up in a data collection archive that can easily reach the Internet distribution circuits and the online porn industry.
The Surveillance Camera Players' performances and cartographies participate in the impetus towards an engagement of performance as "research and expose" (SCP, We Know, 21). Both stagings and tours can be approached as embodied maps that survey (and intervene in) the state of pervasive surveillance.
Other groups, such as the New York Civil Liberties Union, the New York City Surveillance Camera Project, and the Institute for Applied Autonomy also monitor the proliferation of cameras, calling attention to their unregulated use by private and official agencies. The practice of active cartography is a shared tactic among these counter-surveillance militant groups.
In October of 2001, the Institute of Applied Autonomy (IIA) released its web-based program iSee. The program, that can be launched on the Internet as well as through hand-held devices, not only maps the location of cameras in Manhattan—providing a remarkable visual representation of a dense landscape made out of dots—but it also creates itineraries of less monitored routes for users who want to get from here to there without being scrutinized. People en route can simultaneously collaborate in the mapping campaign by alerting others about new cameras as they encounter them in their strolls.
Besides participating in the mapping and surveying endeavor, the work of the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) has been instrumental in protesting the proliferation of cameras in shared spaces as a violation of rights, especially in relation to racial profiling and the rights of free association. The organization stresses the fact that, besides the alleged resourcefulness of cameras as a crime prevention tool, the use of surveillance devices by the police in the context of lawful demonstrations suggests that people's rights to express dissent are being closely watched.
The NYCLU—a branch of the American Civil Liberties Union—stresses the fact that there is currently no regulation regarding procedures on the installation of the cameras and the proper management of the data generated by these devices. The organization is not alone in calling attention to the lack of policies that are fundamental in terms of establishing objectives on the use of vigilance technologies, or the lack of acknowledgement on how this practice affects racially marked communities, and how the pretended efficacy of the technology relies as much in its visibility as in its being unnoted by the untrained eye.
There is also a deep concern about the archives that are being produced by official agents and by private owners. Visual dossiers are being compiled and, as many activists point out, the use of Face Recognition software is not a practice that belongs in sci-fi movies like Steven Spielberg's Minority Report (2002) but that is currently at work. Racial profiling, a practice banned by law, makes a return in the NY post-9/11 era, and activists warn us about the possibility of an unregulated practice of matching data banks' profiles with actual, racially, and ethnically marked individuals.
The importance of establishing protocols to regulate the use of surveillance cameras, and the need to enforce and monitor these procedures, are concerns that have already proven fundamental. On their website, the Surveillance Camera Players list a series of surveillance camera abuses, many of which expose the problematic link between video and digital technologies, when the records produced by surveillance cameras end up in a data collection archive that can easily reach the Internet distribution circuits and the online porn industry.
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